Activity design: some tools and frameworks
Video transcript
Greg Benfield 4 Feb 2013
Welcome to week two. This week our focus is on learning activity design. We are asking you to think about online courses that you’ve done before either as a teacher or student and in particular learning activities that you did within those courses that worked particularly well. You can also draw on your experience of more traditional classroom based learning activities, though in this case you’ll need to think about how to translate those activities into the online environment.
The main activity this week is to contribute to an inventory online activities. You need to design your own activity and find a way to represent it to your colleagues in such a way that it is easy for them to understand how that activity works without necessarily knowing anything about the content students must engage with or the course context in which the activity will take place.
So in this short video I want to introduce you to some learning activity design tools that you might use. These are tools to help you think through your activity design and also to help you represent your final design to others. The resources page contains links to these tools and related resources.
In my work over the years with academics on learning design I’ve found that these sorts of tools can be both a help and hindrance. People have their preferred ways of working and if a tool interferes with that then it’s a hindrance. So I don’t want to advocate any one of these tools in particular. Nor must you choose to use one of them. If you have your own way of doing it then feel free to keep using it. But I would ask you to consider, does your preferred way make it easy for others not expert in your field to understand the key elements of the learning design?
But first let’s think about what we mean by a learning activity. In the mid-2000s I was fortunate enough to contribute to a series of National Effective Practice with E-Learning workshops by the JISC, Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK. I’ll start with the design tools we used in those workshops.
Here’s one possible model of how we might think about a learning activity. It suggests that there are four key components to designing a learning activity. First, we need to be utterly clear about the intended learning outcomes. Next, we need to think about our learners. Then, we think through the constituent parts of the learning environment, paying special attention to the resources and technologies that we need to be available in order for the learning activity to be successful. Finally, we need to think about other support structures, which might include pre-prepared scaffolding materials such as guides as well as other teaching and administrative support.
Using this framework we offered the participants in the workshops a tool we called the effective practice planner, essentially a table containing a series of questions about the decisions that might need to be made by the learning designer. If you look closely you will find that the rows in the effective practice planner correspond loosely to the above four elements of the learning activity framework.
Some of you might find this a convenient way to think about and to represent your design.
Next, I want to show you an approach that I do quite like personally. This approach was promoted by Ron Oliver in Australia in a national project called the AUTC project. If you visit the website you can find a set of exemplar learning designs, like this one. Notice that the learning design consists of just three elements: in the middle, the specific tasks that students must do in the sequence that they must do them. On the left hand side are listed the relevant resources that students will need in order to be able to carry out those tasks; in the right-hand column other supports that will need to be provided as students work their way through those tasks. You can see that this example is a learning design for an extended, semester long group activity. One of the benefits of this way of representing the learning activity over the previous table form is that it shows the activity as a sequence. I also find it a relatively simple way of representing a design. I guess it matches a bit how I think.
So, here’s an example I worked up earlier. This is one way of representing the icebreakers activity that you may have done in week one of this course. There’s a link to a PDF version on the resources page if you want to linger over it. Take a good look at it and think about whether it represents the key elements of that activity reasonably well. Of course one could provide either more or less detail; your preference and purpose will govern that.
One last example. If the previous one was a little simpler than the first example, the next one is much more complex. This is a piece of work led by Diana Laurillard that has been in development for over six or seven years now. It’s called the Learning Designer and it’s an interactive tool with a web interface that helps you input information about your activity and/or course and represents that learning design for you. You can use the Learning Designer at the activity level or even to design an entire course. Along with the design tool itself there are a set of exemplars and learning design resources. You may find these in particular to be extremely helpful. The resources page contains a link to the learning designer. You’ll need to create yourself an account but that will take only about 30 seconds.
Here’s an example of a learning activity called wiki debates being used in sports science. Notice how the design is represented. There’re four types of things that students can be asked to do: produce, collaborate, investigate, and discuss. The representation here provides the viewer with descriptions of which type of activity is taking place at each stage in the sequence, whether that is individual or group, how long it will take, whether tutor support is required, and links to resources that are needed. In order to see how this representation has been produced you will need to actually use the learning design tool and input some information yourself. I’m afraid we don’t have time here to do that but I do suggest that you go to the site and have a play.
Okay. There’s just three example is of learning design tools. You are probably also already familiar with the Gilly Salmon framework of eTivities. And there are many others around. For the Week 2 inventory activity choose one that feels right for you. We’re looking forward to getting a nice set of activity designs that we can share and use for creative inspiration.
Thanks for listening. Bye for now. We’re looking forward to seeing your designs.
